Sapho and Phao

Sapho and Phao is an Elizabethan era stage play, a comedy written by John Lyly. One of Lyly's earliest dramas, it was likely the first that the playwright devoted to the allegorical idealisation of Queen Elizabeth I that became the predominating feature of Lyly's dramatic canon.

Sapho and Phao is known to have been performed at Court before Queen Elizabeth, probably on 3 March 1584; it was also staged at the first Blackfriars Theatre. In these respects it resembles Campaspe, Lyly's other early play; and like Campaspe, sources conflict on the identity of the acting company that performed the work. Court records credit "Oxford's boys," while the title page of the play's first edition specifies the Children of Paul's, Lyly's regular company, and the Children of the Chapel. The evidence, taken as a whole, may indicate that both plays, Campaspe and Sapho and Phao, were acted by a combination of personnel from three troupes of boy actors — those of Paul's and the Chapel and the young company that the Earl of Oxford maintained in the 1580s.

Sapho was entered into the Stationers' Register on 6 April 1584 and was first published that year in a quarto edition printed by Thomas Dawson for the bookseller Thomas Cadman – the same men who were responsible for Q1 of Campaspe, also in 1584. And again like Campaspe, the first edition of Sapho was released in more than one "state" or impression: the two impression of the 1584 Sapho are sometimes defined as two separate quartos.

Another distinct quarto edition was issued in 1591, printed by Thomas Orwin for William Broome. The play was also included in Six Court Comedies, the initial collection of Lyly's plays published by Edward Blount in 1632.

Lyly dramatised the ancient Greek tale of the romance of Sapho and Phao, or Phaon; he was influenced in particular by Ovid's version of the story, supplemented by the work of Aelian. (Abraham Fleming's English translation of Aelian's Varia Historia had been published in 1576.) The Greek tale exists in various forms, some of which conflate the famous Sappho, the poet of Lesbos of the 6th and 7th centuries BCE, with a second figure, a courtesan of the same or a similar name. In so far as the strains of the story can be untangled, it was the courtesan, not the poet, who loved a man named Phaon; some of Sappho's poems are addressed to a male, but he is never named.

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